Understanding The Methods And Agenda of Champion The Vote

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Thursday, 9/29/2011 10:57 am

Shortly after Gov. Rick Perry's giant prayer rally in August, organizers started emailing those who had registered for the event, urging them to get active in a new Religious Right voter mobilization effort called Champion The Vote.

Mefferd: So what is the strategy? I know you have this website, ChampionTheVote.com. How are you compiling the database, how are you identifying these Christians, and how are you utilizing regular Christians who are registered to vote to help you out?

Dallas: So currently we have a database that has over 120 million names in it and through a lot of crashing lists against other lists - another term is called data-mining - we've been able to determine through characteristics people that are very pro-life, traditional marriage, the magazines they subscribe to - these are all things you go out and rent,. We spent a lot of money determining the characteristics of that 120 million and we've been able to find a sub-set of that that are very committed Christians based on lifestyle habits and other things that we can track and trend. We compare it to a registered voter database and if your name is not on there, we know that you're a committed Christian and you're not registered.

Then what we do is we match champions. People that are listening to your program right now, people who say "boy, that's a shame, what can I do?" Well, we ask you to go to ChampionTheVote.com and what we will do is we will sign you up and you will become one of our local activists - we call them champions, a local ambassador. And we give you the technology tools that you will then engage in your local neighborhood to get those 50-60 people that are currently not registered, over a 10-12 month period of time, to get them registered and then you will help message to them to make sure that they show up and have a biblical worldview on the candidates they choose.

We are nonpartisan and, as I say all the time - I'm quoting a friend of mine, Sam Rodriguez - we're not blue, we're not red, we're not about the donkey, we're not about the elephant, we're simply about the agenda of the lamb. And so we help you, as a Champion, help train people in your communities what a biblical worldview is, make sure they're registered, and then they go to the ballot voting with that biblical worldview.

"Biblical worldview," of course, means the standard Religious Right agenda of prompting religion while opposing abortion and gay marriage:

Dallas: Ultimately the heroes of this is not United in Purpose, the umbrella organization, its all of these champions changing our country back to where people raise their hands and vote with a biblical worldview. The fragrance of our nation could smell so differently two, four, six, eight, ten years from now if we got engaged, and that’s what we’re about.

Mefferd: What would you say are the top issues right now that Christians really ought to be concerned about, I know there are plenty of them but how would you rank them right now?

Dallas: Well for me my hot button is religious liberty. We got to make sure that we do not keep trying to strip God out of everything and trying to keep everybody quiet. It seems like there’s a segment over society that’s trying to keep God out of things and keeping God quiet. So I think religious liberty for me personally is number one. And the other two issues is obviously life and marriage. Those to us are the three core issues that everything rests upon.